UNC's Potential For Intelligence Hopefuls High

See, UNC can go two ways with its future class offerings: in the direction of compassion, understanding and nonviolence or toward cultural ignorance and methodical impetuosity.

I think I speak for a good number of students here when I say that I don't want the University to move in the first direction where students are inundated with what Bryan Appleyard called "sentimental psychobabble."

The University of California at Los Angeles, one of our peer institutions, is prepared to offer classes like "Implications of World Crises for Student Stress and Academic Achievement: Coping Strategies" or "Culture and the Deferral of Violence."

Give me a break!

Let U.S. News & World Report rank UCLA ahead of us. I don't care. UNC, please don't start offering classes like that!

Side note: If they were offered, the only people who would take them are the coddled honors students who don't need any more soft, useless ideas threatening their fragile egg-shelled minds (thanks Jim Morrison).

It's not time for classes like "Building Educational Bridges" to impoverished Durhamites or "Know Ourselves and Know Others" (both Honors 30 classes for those interested). It's time to learn Farsi, Arabic, 30 ways to kill people and the ability to live off sand burgers.

It's time to stop promulgating the progressive thoughts that have ruled academia for the past 30 years and start anew with a legitimate way to save our own asses.

And to that end, apparently it's not even that difficult for UNC to get a foothold in the CIA.

According to a 1992 New York Times story, applicants for the CIA's "Undergraduate Student Trainee Program" only needed a combined SAT score of 900 and a grade point average of 2.75. The bar has now been raised to a 3.0. While I'm sure most of Carolina's students meet those qualifications, UNC needs to take it a step further and mold students into CIA operatives in the basement of Davie Hall.

I have a suggestion for the first class of CIA operatives. Two words -- Will Johnson.

Not only is he a Morehead scholar, but he plays basketball. Johnson, like other Moreheads, is more intellectually qualified than the rest of us, and, on top of mere academic qualifications, I heard he once decked Julius Peppers.

Maybe I just blew his cover, but I think he's clever enough to take matters into his own hands.

And another thing.

Ladies, come springtime forget the spaghetti straps and low-rise jeans. You've gotta start wearing the burqa (the full body cloak that the women of the Taliban wear) to get accustomed to being a "woman of cover." It's time to get "under cover" in preparation for being undercover.

Also, to the teachers who work tireless days and nights to come up with irrelevant assignments, menial quizzes and ridiculous Web-based assignments, this is your chance.

It's your chance to end online discussion forums covering the same shit we talked about in class. It's your chance to teach students who have the potential to travel the world, think for themselves and (oh yeah) topple governments.

Now, I don't want our University to feel threatened by the government. I don't want the CIA paying teachers, administrators or coaches to give the agency our brightest and best.

It shouldn't put a bounty on Will Johnson's head or my own. Although, I will admit I'm worth a pretty penny given my dashing good looks and communicative skills in spite of my intellectual ineptitude. However, what the University should do is encourage students for the good of the country to forget Teach for America, Peace Corps and Americorps.

Leave your families, friends and neighbors and go by the name Mullah for a year, armed with Kalashnikov aiming for Osama bin Laden's head.

Screw the fruity, feel-good civil service jobs and take one that will ensure the future success of America.

Without America, forget the preservation of human rights, environmental regulations and all the other causes we fortunate citizens are lucky enough to fight for.

Josh Baylin just submitted an application for the CIA and dreads what his third-grade teacher will say about him. The CIA won't give him security clearance, but if you will, e-mail him at jbaylin@email.unc.edu.